Against the Odds: Mono-Blue Stasis (Premodern)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! This week, we're doing something we've never done before on the channel: playing Premodern! I've been wanting to try the format for a while now (and a bunch of you have asked me about it), but they finally just added it to Magic Online! So today, we're going to check out the format in the best way possible: locking our opponent out of ever untapping with the help of one of the saltiest enchantments ever in Stasis! What is Premodern like? Can Stasis actually win in the format? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Mono-Blue Stasis
The Format
Since we've never played Premodern before, I figured it was probably worth explaining the format briefly. As its name suggests, Premodern contains cards printed before the start of Modern. In practice, this means the format starts with 4th Edition and Ice Age (it excludes the first couple of years of Magic, so no Power Nine or super-expensive Legends / Antiquities stuff) and ends with Scourge, the last set printed before 8th Edition / Mirrodin kick off Modern. Basically, Premodern is cards printed between roughly 1995 and 2002.
The Deck
Our deck today is built around one of my favorite and most nostalgic cards: Stasis! The two-mana enchantment makes everyone skip their untap phase, which means once anything gets tapped—including lands—it's not going to untap as long as Stasis is on the battlefield. The challenge of Stasis is that we have to pay two mana on our upkeep or sacrifice it, which means if we play it fairly, we're going to run out of mana sooner or later (since we also skip our untap phase) and have to sacrifice the Stasis and free our opponent. Thankfully, we've got a few plans to get around this.
While we can win by our opponent scooping once they realize that they'll never be able to play Magic again, if we actually need to get our opponent's life total to zero, we have Black Vise, an old artifact that punishes our opponent for having cards in their hand, essentially dealing one damage to them on their upkeep for each card in excess of four. (So with seven cards in hand, Black Vise will hit our opponent for three damage on their upkeep.) This might sound like a strange finisher, but it takes advantage of the fact that once Stasis starts making everyone skip their upkeep, our opponent won't be able to play their cards, which means eventually they'll end up with seven in hand and Black Vise will burn them out of the game fairly quickly!
The real challenge of winning with Stasis isn't killing our opponent once we have them locked; it's keeping Stasis on the battlefield, which means having the ability to pay a blue mana on each of our upkeeps despite not being able to untap. We've got a few plans with this, starting with Forsaken City in our mana base. The weird old land doesn't untap during our untap phase, but we can untap it during our upkeep by exiling a card from our hand. This means that Forsaken City can keep Stasis going forever all by itself. But the cost is high since we'll have to exile the card we draw each turn to untap it, which means we likely aren't doing anything else. It's great once we have the full lock set up and our opponent is helpless because it makes it impossible to fizzle. But if we get it going too early in the game, we'll often run out of cards and be forced to sac Stasis.
Our second Stasis plan is Chain of Vapor, which might look like an interaction spell since we can use it to bounce our opponent's stuff, but in reality, it's mostly a combo piece because we can use it to bounce our own Stasis for a single mana. The idea is that we can play Stasis, use whatever lands we have to keep it around for a few turns, and then, once we start to run out of mana, use Chain of Vapor on our opponent's end step to bounce Stasis. This will allow all of our land to untap during our turn, and then we can simply replay Stasis to keep our opponent tapped down. With all of our lands now untapped, this will let us keep Stasis going for a bunch more turns, buying us time to find another Chain of Vapor or to finish the game.
Our final way to keep Stasis on the battlefield is by bouncing our own lands with counters like Daze and Thwart and card draw like Gush. The idea here is that we can use these cards to bounce lands that are already tapped down to Stasis; then, over the course of the next few turns, we can replay them and use them to pay for Stasis to keep it on the battlefield. While this plan isn't permanent—eventually, we'll run out of lands to bounce—it can often buy us a bunch of turns, especially if we can chain these spells together, to find something like Chain of Vapor or Forsaken City to close out the game fully.
And that's basically the core of the deck. The rest of our slots go to even more counterspells (the deck has a ton of counters), Powder Keg for a bit of removal against aggro as the original Ratchet Bomb, Impulse and Flash of Insight to dig for Stasis, and Mana Short. Mana Short is interesting. The way a lot of decks will try to beat Stasis is by making land drops but not tapping their lands, build up a bunch of mana, try to have a big turn, and then either win the game or break the lock. Mana Short gives us a way to stop this plan by forcing our opponent to tap all their lands, and with a Stasis on the battlefield, they won't be untapping anytime soon!
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, Stasis did great! We finished 4-1, with our one loss coming to a Storm deck, while we managed to beat two different versions of control, Mono-Red Burn in an hour-long match, and Goblins. While I'm very far from a Premodern expert (this is the first time I've played the format), Stasis actually seemed pretty strong, as weird as that sounds.
Speaking of the format, Premodern was a blast! If you are a fan of old-school Magic, this just might be the perfect format for you. It was super fun to see a bunch of nostalgic old cards that no one plays anymore be the foundation of the format. If you've been looking for a way to play Magic like it was 25 years ago, give Premodern a shot while it's on Magic Online!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. What did you think of Premodern? Let me know in the comments because I really enjoyed playing the format and would like to play it more, if it's something you all are interested in watching! As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
